11 Ways Grocery Stores Trick You Into Spending More Money

Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images Supermarkets bring on all the tricks with two things in mind: to increase the time you spend in the store and to increase the direct contact you have with the merchandise.

Every part of the supermarket is carefully designed and thought out to help achieve their ultimate goal of making the customers buy and spend more.

It's important for consumers to recognize these strategies and their potential effects on their decisions while shopping. Simply knowing these tactics may not be enough to protect you from these ruses. In fact, many tricks are as blatant as can be, but it still isn't enough to stop us from making impulse purchases.

It's important to identify and tackle these psychological manipulations, in the hopes that you would be able to complete your grocery trip without succumbing to the subtle ways in which supermarkets try to get you to you to spend more.

In this post, I highlight these tricks, as I head to the store to buy milk.

1. Shopping carts

When I go to the supermarket, even if it's for something as small as a thimble, I always get a cart. The shiny silver shopping cart is a great way to transport all my stuff swiftly through the store without losing an arm. What you didn't know, is that I just fell for the oldest trick of the trade.

Introduced in 1937 by a very successful businessman and inventor Sylvan Goldman, the shopping cart has been making consumers spend more money all over the world. Large carts are immensely effective because it targets our affinity to filling up empty space while triggering humans' primordial need to hoard food.

Evolutionarily speaking, the human brain hasn't progressed very far from its primitive state, which is primed to guard against starvation. According to Goldman, we are wired to gather and store food in time of abundance to prepare for the drought, and when our shopping cart looks half-empty, it's our natural instinct to fill it, no matter how big the space is.

2. Hiding the dairy section

Did you ever go to the supermarket to go pick up milk and walk out with a lot more? This might not be entirely your fault.

Floor plans are designed to hide dairy products and essentials to the back of the store to make sure you pass by as many products as possible on your way there. This may inconvenience the customers, but that's a sacrifice that the supermarkets are willing to make in order to make more profit.

So as soon as I walk into the supermarket, the race begins for me to find the milk as soon as possible with the minimum amount of path covered.

3. Luring you in with flowers and baked goods

As soon as I enter the store with my huge cart, the first thing I notice is the smell. Most supermarkets place high-margin products, such as baked goods and flowers, near the entrance. The placement guarantees that those products are the first items you encounter when you come into the store with your empty carts.

Due to the fact these are non-essential luxury items, many people think twice about purchasing them, especially with a full cart of items. When you first enter and your huge cart is still empty, many shoppers feel okay about splurging. Bring on the tulips!

Supermarkets are actually killing two birds with one stone with this trick because the pleasant smells also activate your salivary glands, which is shown to boost the number of impulse purchases in many shoppers. It also puts customers in a good mood and increase their willingness to spend more.

It's one great hit after another playing on the loudspeaker. Supermarkets tend to play soft and slow-paced music to make the customers move the same way. Swaying throughout the store like they're in a music video, as they nonchalantly place items into their carts.

You come back to your senses for a second and realize that you should be going home to make dinner by 7 P.M., but what time is it now? Notice there are no clocks anywhere inside the store? It's purposely absent. Supermarkets want to prevent you from seeing what time it is to keep you from tracking how long you've been at the store. This eliminates or minimizes, any rush to run out of the store to meet your other responsibilities.

5. Putting expensive items in high-traffic areas

Many people consistently move from right to left throughout the store, and they show a greater affection towards moving counter-clockwise.

The movement pattern can be attributed to the practice of driving on the right side of the road. Even if you're not a driver, you follow this flow because that is the system exhibited by everyone else in the store as you shop, and you can't easily get past them in a narrow aisle unless you're also abiding by the majority rule.

The supermarkets then take this natural phenomenon and use it to their advantage, as they place more expensive items on the right side of the aisles rather than the left. Next time you go shopping, you might want to consider looking to your left side, there might be better value there.

6. Putting brand names at eye level

As I stroll down the aisle in search of milk, I notice Oreos — it's right in my face screaming at me to take a pack home with me. They'll go so well with the milk.

Upon closer examination of the shelves, I notice the generic brand of Oreos, and it's a couple of dollars cheaper and most likely tastes the same as its name brand counterpart. However, after briefly thinking about it, I pick up the package of Oreos and move down the aisle. The majority of the items I'm noticing and buying are at eye level. This is no coincidence.

There are many rows of shelves on an aisle — some products are at the top and some naturally at the bottom. What retailers don't want you to know is that they are strategically placed to make you spend more. It is natural for customers to want to buy the products that they see first, therefore they place the most expensive items at your eye level while the other items go around it, in harder-to-reach places.

That isn't all they take into account — products that cater to kids will be placed at their eye level as well. More often than not, kids will ask Mom or Dad to buy it for them.

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images 7. The .99 trick

Whether you're a math whiz or simply horrible at math, we can all do addition and subtraction, and simple rounding, right? According to our purchasing patterns, we can't. In our defense, shopping does not follow the logic of basic math.

Psychological pricing is based on the idea that certain prices have an impact on consumer purchasing habits. A notorious pricing tactic involves the number 9, usually in the form of $-.99. Although only a cent away from the next whole number, when $-.99 is attached to it, people have a tendency to round it down to the next lowest monetary unit, which is mathematically incorrect, but it happens subconsciously.

For example, a jar of olives priced at $4.99 would be thought of as $4 rather than $5.

Another factor that contributes to this phenomenon stems from a person's tendency to read numbers from the left to right. This is associated with "left-digit effect anchoring," which means that the first number that we read becomes encoded into our minds before we get a chance to get through the rest of the numbers.

8. Making you feel like you need to stock up

Remember Hurricane Sandy and Y2K? People rushed to the stores and stocked up like there was no tomorrow, because of the fear that there might not be one. Even in the absence of those extreme conditions, people still feel the need to stock up.

Do I really need 12 pints of ice cream? Probably not, but I am so very susceptible to the so-called "sales." When these items are on sale, you are afraid that they'll sell out.

For example, a can of bread crumbs comes out to being $1.59 cents each. Right now, they're on sale at four for $4. Considering this, I would be saving $2.36 on 4 cans. It's almost the equivalent of getting 2 cans for free (because I liberally round up to calculate the savings on the items that I want, and conservatively round down on the price that I have to pay). Therefore, in my non-objective mind, I'm almost getting each can for half price. Amazing deal! This makes me feel that I'm getting more for my money, even though I'm actually spending more than I wanted. But, consumers fall victim to this tactic even when the item isn't on sale, simply because it says "4 for $4." They feel the need to unnecessarily make purchases and spend more money than they planned.

9. Per-customer limits

You've seen this sign before at a supermarket: "Limit 2 per customer." This makes me look at the item again even if I wasn't planning on getting it in the first place. Once I become convinced that I can somehow remotely incorporate it into my life, I start panicking until I buy it.

For example, cat food is on sale right now for 10 for $10, with a 10 per person limit. I get anxious seeing this, even though I don't own a cat. Ten for $10 means it's a great deal, so obviously I'm going to reap the most benefit by buying all 10, and wait, it's 10 per customer. That, in my head, proves that it's such a good deal that if I don't get it then, it'll sell out. Anxiety and hastiness can often lead to impulse purchases.

10. Fake sales

I never forgot the time I purchased a bottle of detergent advertised as being 50% more. Wow, what a great deal. I just assumed that it was for the same price. What's the point of specifying that it's "50% more," if it wasn't for free? I was proven wrong. The bottle contained 50 percent more detergent, but the price as also 50 percent higher.

You can be susceptible to these types of sales if you don't take out your calculator and do the math down to the cent at the supermarket, which most people don't.

These "fake" sales will convince some unaware shoppers, like myself, to make a bigger purchase than they need. This was frustrating and I was reminded of my mistake every time I lifted the bottle to pour the detergent into the soap dispenser.

11. Checkout lanes

Products placed on an endcap display, found at the checkout lanes, will sell at a faster pace and they're usually marked up at a higher price. The small items available at endcaps are merchandise that stores want you to buy impulsively while you wait to pay for your items.

Think of a pack of gum or a candy bar. You didn't need it enough to have thought to place it into your cart before you left the store, but now that it's face-to-face with you at your eye-level and costs about a dollar (actually priced at $1.99), you don't see why not.